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Adam knew the universe was created in six evenings and mornings 2

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This issue is critical to the veracity of the scriptures. If poetry was God’s purpose in inspiring the writer, whom we assume was Moses, then we’ve lost much of the distinction between the biblical account and the myths of other religions. Any religion can contend that its view of the origin of the universe is a “spiritual” or allegorical or “poetic” view. The believer in the bible claims that his book, the bible, is not a myth but contains the inerrant statement as to the true Creator God. If we give up that contention and make Genesis 1 another “poetic” account, then we have given up the key argument that Jesus Christ is the only saving name under heaven. Once the facts of Genesis are acknowledged as mere allegory, then secular science fills the gap with process as the actual and true history of what happened. Process means God didn’t really create instantaneously out of nothing the life and substance of the earth. God had a part in the process; perhaps he initiated it, but the rest was chance mutation and erosion. The Creator God of the bible becomes something other than the One who speaks and matter comes to be. What about Psalm 104? If Jesus’ Father was not the biblical Creator who spoke matter out of nothing based on His word, then it’s quite a leap to assert that Christ could speak miracles into the historical, time-based, physical world.

No one but the absolute sovereign Creator can save and judge humankind. And if the Creator’s word is mere poetry, then we really don’t know who He is and what power He has, particularly if He gave us a view that looks for all the world like history but turns out to be mere poetry. Any view that poses that the six days didn’t really happen the way it is narrated in Genesis cannot symbolize, allegorize, or represent anything except that the God of the bible is a liar, and one that is insecure in his position as Lord and Creator, at that. And that makes the writer of Genesis a liar also.

Do you see how idiotic this makes God look? But it gets worse.   Consider Moses, the putative author of the account. Consider also the hypothetical that Adam knew that God took billions of years to create the universe and accepted it. When first created, Adam was smart, his brain being unspoiled by sin or clouded in its judgment. The first man, before sin entered the world, was made in the image of God and could have looked around and easily calculated that the magnificent world in which he had been placed must have taken an extremely long time to build. Or God revealed it to Adam. So wouldn’t Adam have told his descendants how the creation happened. Based on the genealogies of Genesis, Adam was still alive at the time Noah’s father was born. Noah’s son, Shem, could have very well lived until just before Abraham was alive.

The story would have been family history, and those children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the twelve patriarchs would have, therefore, shared Adam’s story of a lengthy creation with their children, who entered Egypt. Even if it was passed down inexactly as “a very long time,” why wasn’t everyone raising concerns about Moses’ version? If Moses wrote that the creation took only six days, wasn’t be being unfaithful to what Adam passed down to his descendants about the creation? And if it disagreed with the folklore or traditions (likely to occur in any family history/genealogy) passed down to the Semitic people over generations, why didn’t anyone even whisper a challenge to or question Moses’ version? Why complete acceptance by the Israelites if Moses’ explanation was so radically different from the real history as told by the ancestor, Adam? A simple “That’s not what we’ve been told” would have at least been mentioned by one faithful member of the descendants of Shem, Noah, and Abraham. If it took billions of years, then Moses was a false prophet for writing a false description of the creation of the universe.

But Moses was not a false prophet. If God had taken billions of years to create the universe, Moses would have said so. A symbolic day-age view, an allegorical-only[1] view, or any other view that denies the true historical nature of the six-day creation makes fools or worse out of the personages of the bible. Adam may have been foolish enough to believe the serpent and take of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but once chastised severely by the Lord when driven out of the Garden and facing a cursed world, Adam was not so corrupted as to falsify the history of the creation of the world. That corruption would come later, and God would deal with the violent and the false with the Great Flood, leaving faithful Noah and his family to vouchsafe the true history.

Adam would have known the length of time it took to create the world. He had one-on-one discourse with the Creator, who was a good and personal God and who would not have withheld such knowledge from his creation. What purpose would the author of the universe have had in concealing from His first creation, the being most like Him, a being created in His own image, the amount of time it took and the method of creating the universe? It would make no sense for God to hide that information from Adam yet reveal it to Moses thousands of years later. You can argue that people by the time of Moses would have forgotten the truth of the creation and needed reminding, but that position would still assume the fact that Adam did know but that his descendants forgot.

But let’s assume for a moment that it did take God billions of years to create the universe. We then have the problem of Eve – one woman, one other human being on the planet. There’s that problem of the missing links – all those people who would have been a part of the gene pool for the evolution of man. If the animals, birds, and fishes all evolved over time, why not man? Adam would have been the end-result of that evolution.[2] But the problem for Adam and Eve was a dearth of people. Evolution requires lots of time and lots of genetic recombination during countless mitoses events during reproduction events to result in successful changes to species. Where were all the people or whatever human-like or ape-like creatures and which were pre-Homo sapiens and who made up the pool for genetic variation?

After God put Adam to sleep and formed Eve from his rib and Adam awoke, he found only one other person living – Eve. One person, then two – not the ideal number of people for countless mutation events to occur, especially retroactively, seeing there were no human-like creatures that were in existence and could have been the precursors for Adam and Eve at the time they walked the earth. Also, if Adam and Eve had been created miraculously and instantaneously, how come everything else took billions of years? Why would God change his practice from slow, chance-governed, genetic variation over billions of years to instantaneous and miraculous creation just to create Adam and Eve? “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” James 1:8.

The bible is a book of witness. Two witnesses are required to prove a fact. “In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established.” II Corinthians 13:1. It was the same under the Old Covenant. See Deut. 19:15. Adam and Eve were witnesses to the Creator Himself and His original instructions to them about being fruitful, taking dominion, and about what trees could be eaten in the Garden. They listened to the serpent and became false witnesses about the character of the God who created them. The fact that they became false witnesses instead of being true witnesses permanently affected them and their descendants. Being a false witness of what God has said has serious consequences. Shall we add to the sin of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the sin of being false witnesses to the duration of creation? If that is their sin also, then the bible should mention it.

Jesus Christ, the Son by whom all things were made, is also a witness to the creation. John 1:1-3. If the Son Himself knew that the earth was created in 15 billion years, then he was under obligation as a witness to point out this fact. Instead, Christ affirmed the historicity of the Genesis account. Matthew 19:4-8; Mark 10:6-9; Like 24:27.   The Trinity always has two witnesses to the acts and veracity of two of the persons within the Trinity. I John 5:6. Also, Jesus’ works witnessed of Him, and the Father’s work of creation witnesses of Him. John 5:36; Acts 15:18. The fact that each member of the Trinity knows and testifies to the works of the other members, we can rest on the fact of the history recorded in the scripture. Man’s word is not needed by the Trinity to verify anything the Trinity has done, whether we’re discussing a miraculous creation in six days or a miraculous resurrection of the Son of God in three days. We believe that Christ rose from the dead – a very unscientific thing to believe – based on the historical record of supposedly true witnesses. But if we can’t trust the historical account of Moses, upon whom the New Testament witnesses based their faith, how can we trust the New Testament witnesses as to the historicity of the resurrection?

Science cannot operate without the ability to test and potentially falsify the result of an experiment. The experimentation process is the attempt to use the works of the physical world as witnesses. If the witnessing tests of the experiment cannot be falsified after repetition in the physical evidence, then we have confidence that the hypothesis being tested is true. Such cannot be done with the origin of the earth – a one-time event in history. Therefore, the human witnesses are more important than any attempt to re-create what occurred thousands of years ago within the presupposition that God could not, did not, would not have created the world in such a “ridiculously short time period as six days.” It is particularly egregious when scientific principles of testing the hypotheses are removed from the process as post-modern science has accomplished with respect to origins.

If Moses is wrong, then he not only is a false witness as to the creation time period, but he also distorted the historical oral record of his own time and people and his ancestor, Adam. If God took billions of years to create the universe, then Adam’s witness would be to that effect, and his witness would be contrary to that of Moses, who confused the historical record by writing that it only took six days. Any literary or symbolic value to his writing, which apparently (according to modern man) fooled people for thousands of years until scientists like Darwin and Lyell opened our eyes to the truth, would not compensate for the falsehood he imposed upon millions of beguiled people who for thousands of years thought he meant what he wrote. We have another witness, a historian if you will, to the creation and its duration – the Son of God Himself. If it took billions of years to create the universe, then Jesus Christ had an obligation to testify to that truth and not leave us to accept the false witness of Moses, whom Jesus always quoted as a true prophet, thereby affirming his testimony. If Moses was a false prophet, so was Jesus Christ, and the entire faith falls under the weight of those two false witnesses.

The lie that the bible is a false witness because it does not affirm a 15-billion-year process for the formation of the earth until Lyell, Darwin, and others opened our eyes is one of the reasons so many scientists are absolutely hostile to creationism. It is also why they have no patience with people trying to find a compromise between the bible and science, so called. Truth is not something to be toyed with. Either God and Jesus Christ and Adam and Moses are true witnesses that God created the universe in a brief period or they are false witnesses because it occurred in a long period of time. If a brief period, there is no reason to doubt Moses’ words in Gen. 1-2. If a long period, there is every reason to doubt Moses’ words in every part of the Pentateuch and Jesus’ words throughout the bible. It is time that theologians quit trying to mix darkness and light by attempting to unite the anti-God philosophy/presuppositions of post-modern science with the historical testimony of the biblical authors and actors. In which authority do you put your faith? What faith are you teaching your hearers when you teach? Are you creating stumbling blocks for them by trying to mix two things that cannot be mixed?

[1] A true 6-day creation does not rule out allegory, for God’s every act has meaning beyond the superficial. God, being omnipotent, need not conform his poetry to reality; he can create reality to conform to his poetry.

[2] An idea which leads to the question: “When does evolution end for the being at the top of the evolutionary survival heap?” Never. So what did God intend when he created someone in His own image, if evolutionary process could improve man after he had been created in the Creator’s image? What does he become better than that?